Feed my Eyes, Feed my Soul

New York is my home. Walking down 1st Avenue feels much like walking down the corridor of a large home, padding over to my sister's room in my fuzzy slippers. This place is requires of me only my truest self; it lives within me as much as I in it. Last night we were musing over beers in a dark East Village tavern about our home. Though it is home, that does not mean there is not room in my heart for other cities, other adventures. There is no where else in this country I would move, and I say this as someone who has seen nearly all of it. The world, on the other hand, holds far too many beautiful mysteries to be left unexplored. This lead me back to the exotic places that still linger in the landscape of my mind.

I have seen the beauty of Paris, walking along the Seine. I have seen the wonders of the Rockie Mountains on a crisp spring morning. I have watched the sun dip into the Pacific Ocean, setting the Santa Monica hills ablaze. I have swam in the azure waters of the Caribbean. I have found myself mesmerized by the grandeur of my beloved New York. Beauty feeds a deep place inside of me; I feast on it and succumb to it. When I think of beauty though, the kind that takes your breath away, there is one place that eclipses all others: my desert.

The unexpected bursts of beauty amidst desolation can bring a tear to my eye to this day. I can feel it inside of me: the unceasing desert wind, the purple and red of the sunset, the green jewels of life around the Tigress river that shock your senses as you come atop a sandy hill, even the sea of nothingness that surrounded me as we moved through southern Iraq. The orange and white trucks bustling down the road, the people dressed in flowing robes, the bazaars selling bootleg Micheal Jackson Cd's, all of it both terrifying and enticing in its complete otherness. My heart beats faster at the memory, filling me with both anxiety and longing. Funny though, looking at pictures of that place, it never looks the way I remember. I wonder now if the beauty we are drawn to is somehow reflective of something inside ourselves.

Iraq is a land of contradictions, juxtapositions: beautiful and barren, dangerous and peaceful, fight and flight. I sometimes think my own beauty comes from the same kind of contradiction. I am not the most physically stunning specimen, but there is something about me, like an oasis in a desert that makes me shine in a way that is not as simple as a beautiful face or body. What that thing is, I don't know.

I know that a desert wind blows through me, making me volatile and passionate and ever changing. Out of the currents of past pain grows a spectacular garden of serenity. The deserts of things yet unattained drive me forward. The constant dangers of the world makes me brave and grateful. The desert winds in my soul whisper to me. They tell me to live, live passionately, cherish people, push on despite the seemingly endless expanse of emptiness that sometimes surrounds me. I live in that rugged, beautiful, scary, exciting place, not as a soldier, not as a tourist, but as wild creature.

The wildness of that place speaks to the wild thing inside of me. That is why her beauty reigns supreme, that is why I must never stop seeking life in far away lands. There are pieces of me waiting to be discovered in faraway lands. I found my home in New York, but home is not the end of the journey. Home is the place that gives you the strength and confidence to venture back out, knowing that there will always be a place to which you can fully return.

The Hideousness of Men

I am reading a book right now that describes the intense, animalistic cruelty of men. Of course there are exceptions in the book, a few flickers of humanity in the cold landscape. It’s not just the book that got me thinking about the hideousness of man, and the power even that gives them. My boyfriend gave me another one of his “men are heartless animals” speeches.

Since the inception of our relationship, he has taken it upon himself to paint me a picture of what men are really like. He claims that it is because he resents the fact that their bad behavior has made his love life more complicated in the past. I finally asked him the question that has nagged me, as he spoke about the way men only want to use me. I asked him if he really thought that he was the only man who could care for me. If every other man just wanted a piece of ass, and saw me as nothing more. He snorted and told me he was sure some men would actually want to be with me, but they would want to fuck me first.

After three and a half years with this man, I will give him the benefit of the doubt. I will believe that he tells me these things, not to try to intimidate me, but to educate me. Why? I still really don’t know. It has been informative though. And I suppose it was the combination of reading vicious stories about the plight of my sisters in the middle east and my boyfriend’s speech that made me begin to think about the grotesque nature of man.

....

One of the most breathtakingly beautiful places I have ever been was not the Caribbean, it was not Mexico, it was not Europe or the Rocky Mountains. The place that truly took my breath away, brought tears to my eyes at the sheer wonder of it all was Iraq.

The beauty of other places is so easy, so effortlessly giving. The beauty amidst desolation; the splendor of the sunsets that painted the rocky horizon deep shades of Orange and Red and Purple; the shock and delight to see lush green surrounding the rivers after coming over yet another dusty hill; these things were gifts and perhaps just due to the contrast and the unbending will of this hard place, I fell in love with it.

I began to think last night that perhaps the species of man is like that harsh unforgiving place. When a man does something out of character:tender, soft, kind, it takes our breath away. The idea that we are desired enough for this selfish creature to change his ways, to be our own, to be gentle, it is enough to make us fall in love. If they are good men, then it will remain beautiful. We will stay captivated by the wonder of the beauty in this naturally ugly thing, we will remain in love with this mysterious being, captivated by him. But when he changes, begins to morph into that which our love is not strong enough to keep him from becoming, when he begins to hurt us; it is the memory and the potential for beauty we once saw that will make us stay. We will stay and stay until he has beaten the love right out of us and we no longer see the sunsets in his eyes, when all we see is the ugliness.

The hideouness of man and the female eye to see beyond it, the intense beauty of a man unlike his barbaric peers, the false hope and the happy endings; these are the stories that live in the war-torn heart of a Woman.